Product service and support typically involves sending a customer engineer to a customer site to service a product. Once on-site, the customer engineer will attempt to ascertain or diagnoses the problem that led to the visit and implement a repair. Remote service and support may be accomplished over the telephone through a series of questions and answers between the customer and the customer engineer. Unfortunately, the problem described by the customer is not always the actual problem and results in an unhappy customer and a frustrated customer engineer.
There exists a need for a remote diagnostic tool that reduces the cost of providing service and support to customers. Since a portion of all service calls do not require the replacement of hardware, it would be desirable to provide for service calls without an on-site visit by a customer engineer. For example, there would be savings of both time and money if service requests could be handled from a centralized location by a remote diagnostic tool over standard telephone lines.
It would be desirable and of considerable advantage to provide a diagnostic tool that provides for continuous remote monitoring of selected instrument operations. Furthermore, it would be advantageous if such a remote diagnostic tool could also provide automated access to reference material required to diagnose and repair service related problems. There is a need for connecting an instrument to a diagnostic tool either remotely or locally to provide for real-time instrument diagnostics.
It would be advantageous to be able to determine the effect of instrument configuration on a problem and to provide for remote monitoring of an instrument's self diagnostic and self inspection firmware and hardware, and present this information in an easily understandable form to provide faster and more accurate diagnosis of the problem. It would also be advantageous to provide for interpretation of information or observations gathered about an instrument which is malfunctioning, using that information to determine the cause of the malfunction and then correct the cause.
It will be apparent from the foregoing that there is a need for a diagnostic tool that can be coupled to an instrument from a remote location and that provides for inspection of instrument variables, parameters and setpoints, the viewing of histories and performance testing, as well as manages an information resource necessary to repair the instrument.